A LESSON IN PHYSICS

One by one the old barns are collapsing.
Just last week one went down
on the Peoria road.
You couldn’t say
it was unexpected, racked as it was and leaning
a little more out of plumb
each time I passed.

I’m closing in
on 65 myself. And although
I’ve been partially rebuilt, with certain adjustments
to my anatomy,
I won’t last long.

A new roof and some cross-bracing
would have bought that old barn a few more years.
Triangulation
makes a difference. But in the end, gravity
takes over. Which is why
levity is so precious
while it lasts.

“Yet, as previously hinted, this omni-tooled, open-and-shut carpenter, was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep himself awake.” Herman Melville, Moby Dick